iPads are much more durable than laptops or netbooks. We've been evaluating them at my company. They are also much easier to set up.
Um, ok. So, battery dies in an iPad, what do you do? You can't just put in a new one, the batteries aren't user replaceable. Flash chip goes bad in an iPad, what do you do? You can't just take it out like you could a standard SSD and load up a standardized image on it. Screen breaks on an iPad, what do you do? Its certainly not as easy as changing a laptop's screen.
Also, you can't easily set up limited user accounts. Yeah, there are "parental controls" but that isn't going to be as safe as individual accounts.
You seem to think that there is no problem with a textbook being 10 years old. Well, a lot you (don't) know about textbooks. Not only do they need updating much more frequently then that, many schools don't have enough to give to students. They have to share them in class and cannot take them home. It's a huge problem and a huge expense.
Um, throughout high school I regularly used textbooks that were 10 years or more old for subjects that don't change Math, English, Keyboarding, etc. other than parts in the math textbook talking about a record store, it was just fine.
And so, you mean to say that somehow a school can't afford a $50 book, but can afford a $500 device + $50 book?
As for the $500 for a device. Well, that's as cheap or cheaper than all the texts a middle or high schooler uses and you didn't include all the other teaching content - interactive and all - that can be included. You can make parents share financial responsibility or assume all of it. We used to have to pay for lost or damaged textbooks. Why not iPads?
paper is not the main cost all the iPad is, is just the thing to run it. The book isn't free. You are still paying $50 a book on an iPad, the difference is that the book is electronic and not physical. If the paper was the main culprit I'd have my nook loaded up with all best sellers and would be saving a ton of money. You still have to buy the books. Yeah, there might be a slight discount, its not free though.
Like it or not, the publishers are all moving fast in this direction. Where you see that its because they can make more money I see it as they can provide more value and replace some more expensive assets.
What the fuck don't you get?
A) School pays $500 per student for an iPad
B) School pays $50 per student per book for the iPad
Is the digital model. The paper model is
A) School buys a paper book for $50 per student per book.
Yeah, e-books have some nice extras. Do they justify an extra $500 per student. Hell no.
So instead of having private firms that you could trust because they would be competing for your trust in food safety, we instead have a massive government entity which has denied things based on political reasons. Just what I want! For example, due to pressure by the sugar industry the FDA denied the Miracle Berry (a fruit with a chemical that makes things taste sweet) the ability to be in foods (it would essentially allow for a sweeter with no calories that actually tasted sweet).
As for the EPA, its a joke. Take for instance the BP oil spill, thanks to government intervention, BP had a liability cap! Had there been no government intervention, the people of the gulf could have sued BP for all their damages, and perhaps BP wouldn't have let such a thing happen in the first place.
As for radioactive isotopes, they simply weren't considered dangerous back then, otherwise do you think people would have drank them? The advertisers weren't exactly sneaky about what it contained....
it can also do some pretty cool stuff (like, say, Apollo, interstate freeways, gas and electric utility regulation, etc.).
Apollo was "cool" but it was a dead end. We wasted a shitload of money to just say "hey we made it to the moon" and that was it. Plus, all this info we got on how to build Apollo is classified so even though we paid for it, private companies can't get the blueprints to recreate it. So yeah, we've been to the moon... And wasted a bunch of money doing it.
Interstates are nice, but were there more efficient ways of doing it? Cheaper? Etc. My guess is, yes and had the government not done anything about it, we might have good private rail/air/subway transport or something to that degree.
Gas/Electric utility regulation is actually a terrible thing. Ever tried to contest a bill with an electric company? Its nearly impossible because thanks to a government-granted monopoly, you can't switch.
And private corporations can never breed tyranny because you have the choice to support them or not don't agree with Wal-Mart's labor policies? Don't go there, they won't get a dime of your money. Frustrated about the Sony rootkit? Don't buy Sony products. Don't like Intel's stance on IP? Don't buy Intel products. Etc. On the other hand that is impossible to do with the government for 2 reasons:
A) You can't not pay your taxes. Don't like the war in Iraq? Well, too bad, you are still paying for their bullets! Don't agree with Obama's policies? Well, too bad you have to fund them. Don't like the bailout? Too bad, you are paying for them. With companies its different, if you don't like them, they don't get your support, simple as that.
B) Our money is not real money rather it is slips of paper. The government can print all of the money it wants to fund whatever because our currency is tied to nothing so until the world wakes up and fiat currencies go back to their intrinsic value, the government can fuck with our economy all they want.
But really, your entire argument rests on the belief that anyone born poor or with learning disabilities does not deserve an education. That's a pretty low moral standard to aim for, and one you are strangely proud of.
Um, how does it? Lets imagine a scenario with no public schools at all. The world wouldn't suddenly collapse, people would just learn more efficiently. People would have a greater deal of specialization which would allow them to better perform in the workplace. Lets face it, why should Joe Sixpack who is really great at, say, diesel mechanics have to read Shakespeare when he can simply be learning how to be a better mechanic? Its silly that we've put people on a treadmill to "higher education" that basically screws the poor and the working-class. Because of government-run schools, a high school diploma is basically worthless, its not a qualification. If you walk into almost every job interview situation and proudly proclaim you graduated high school you will get laughed at. So what happens? Even for entry-level positions employers now want a college degree and that screws the poor.
Consider Joe Sixpack, he is a great diesel mechanic but bad at English, Algebra and History. So rather than Joe Sixpack being able to really study mechanics and being a better worker, he has to sit through classes that are boring for him and cost taxpayer dollars. Not only that but thanks to a high school degree being basically worthless, Joe Sixpack now has to go to tech school or a university at his own expense basically screwing him financially for the next ten years of his life unless he magically finds a job that doesn't require that, which is rare these days.
Most people should not go to college its silly that its so forced on people, we now have people only being productive from 22+ years or older and piled on with debt, or too poor to get into college and have a door slammed on them by potential employers for not going to college.
The elimination of the public school system would allow for greater specialization, better workers, better innovators who aren't wasting their time and my money.
Note that these benefits are specific to devices like the iPad and not PCs. PCs are much more expensive, delicate and difficult to set up, maintain and use.
PCs are a hell of a lot easier to batch set up and load. AFAIK you can't just remotely load up 200 iPads, on the other hand its pretty damn easy to do that with PCs, just network boot them then push all the stuff in from the network.
And the problem isn't the paper, its the publishers. Without copyright you'd pay $2-3 for a textbook, not $50-100 for one. eBook editions of things really aren't all that cheap. Plus, there is a durability/resale question. A textbook is pretty easily readable in 10 years, especially a math book, things aren't going to fundamentally change. History books, science books? Yeah. Math, English, etc? No. But they used this for math and not the other subjects. Will an iPad even hold a charge in 10 years? Won't publishers simply screw schools out of books because with digital ones you can remove the older ones and make them pay for all new books whenever you want to upgrade, etc.
As far as I can tell, yes, this is throwing money at a problem to get in the headlines. Any return on investment is minimal because the iPad doesn't eliminate the need for many things, plus, iPads are fragile. Drop a book in the hall? No big deal. Drop an iPad and you are out ~$500, lose a book and you might be out ~$50-100, lose an iPad and you are out ~$500, someone steals a book? No huge deal. Someone steals an iPad? It lands in a pawn shop somewhere. Etc.
But it doesn't. You can't just throw money at a problem and find a solution, in fact the most worthwhile solutions are the ones that cost the least. The US government has no problems tossing money in education/infrastructure but its all worthless because they are simply redistributing wealth that is more efficiently done in the private sector. Consider a private school, barring some of the weird religious schools which specialize in fascism and indoctrination, private schools are in general better because they don't get the money thrown at them every which way. Yeah, private schools are expensive, but add in how many -millions- of dollars go to public schools that don't perform. Why is it that almost every single privately educated student is better educated than a public school educated student despite massive redistribution of wealth? With a private school, they have to make every dollar count. A private school can't just ask voters for an extra million, they can't take money from people who don't use the service like public schools can. Yet they have a higher quality.
Governments breed waste, inefficiency and tyranny and can never lead to a net gain for society when compared to a private institution.
But the problem is with the publisher, not with the educational institution. Textbook publishers regularly screw students/schools for what is essentially public domain material.
In all honesty, using free primary sources and teaching the class from that would be a lot cheaper than textbooks for most classes.
Bullshit. The "community" and the "individual" have zero rights when it comes to this. Its microsoft's servers they can do whatever the hell they feel like with this. Now what they -can't- do is they can't not refund his money for putting down a legitimate town name because that is fraud.
It depends on the person, my guess is you live near a person or talk to a person on a regular basis who has more money than $75K a year. Being rich doesn't mean your elitist, you are confusing the two. I've talked to several very trusting, very level-headed people who make upwards of $100K a year, but they aren't assholes about it. They didn't go to the ivy league schools, they don't drive a 2011 car, they have a decent house, but its nothing spectacular compared to the area.
Yeah, there are rich people like Paris Hilton who everyone knows is rich, but there are a lot more people who are moderately rich who you wouldn't know that they were unless you saw their financial statement or were good friends with them.
Oh, and by the way, a lot of the people who act really "rich" really aren't, they just live on credit (you know the people, the ones who went to the Ivy League schools, drive new cars, have the huge homes, etc) and while they may be simi-rich, they live beyond their means.
Sure, right now. But lets say 20 years from now you find out you have X disease that costs Y amount to treat it with an experimental drug insurance doesnt' cover. Or lets say you find out that your parents/grandparents need taken care of, etc.
Its easy to be happy when your in your teens till about middle age on less money if you stay single, but if you have a family or when your family needs taken care of, you need a lot more money.
Not all of them, but I can guarantee you that all of them will be using some form of networking in the future, and experience there can't hurt them and will only help them, just like we aren't all going to be mechanics working in a car shop, but it sure helps to know how to do basic maintenance on a car so you don't get screwed at the service shop. Same thing with networking, if you know how to set up a network using the same principles you've used all your life playing games (setting up Xbox Live, setting up system link, getting free wi-fi from your neighbors, etc.) you aren't going to get screwed by Geek Squad.
Exactly, and I guarantee you that if you walk around a college campus and ask incoming Freshman their first experience with networking it will almost always be related to getting past a block of some site in high/middle school. Ordinarily, few high school students would use proxies, VPNs, etc. but when they can use it to play games or get on Facebook...
The problem is that makes no sense. Pre-digital laws when applied in the digital world make no fucking sense and to apply them is stupidity.
Monopolies are bad in the physical world because they take limited resources and monopolize them. There are only so many oil wells in the world, there are only so much (clean) water in the world, etc. when a single company takes control of them they can charge through the roof and make everyone else pay. But this isn't like that.
Barring government intervention in the form of software patents, there are no limited resources when it comes to ads on the web, and barring lock-in with physical things or a -huge- company taking all available IP addresses/bandwidth or something, a monopoly can't exist that harms consumers.
The idea that any company can monopolize infinite resources is laughable. Don't like Google? Use one of their thousands of competitors. Don't like DoubleClick, advertise elsewhere.
The internet allows for unlimited resources, you can't monopolize infinity. Just because the law says something doesn't mean its right, correct and not fucking stupid.
The problem is, with virtual things there is no monopoly when there is no lock-in look at Standard Oil, they could nearly monopolize the oil industry because there aren't an infinite number of oil wells. On the other hand whats the overhead for opening up a competitor to Google Ads/Double Click, its effectively zero. A monopoly is bad because it monopolizes a limited resource, with an internet company there is no scarcity! Barring government intervention in the form of software patents, there is no barrier to me starting up my own internet ad company.
Pre-digital laws make no sense when transitioning to digital. Monopolies are bad because they monopolize a limited resource, since there are really no* limited resources on the internet, it makes no sense to punish a company for being a non-existent monopoly which can't exist because there are no limited resources to monopolize.
*With the exception of things like IP addresses, bandwidth, etc which will all grow as the internet grows, but in essence the point still stands unless the reason Google is being sued is because of using up too many addresses.
Yes it does, Standard Oil was a monopoly because it was not better than its competition but rather relied on the government to fuel its practices, without the government. Plus, by the time Standard Oil was about to be broken up, competitors had effectively nullified its competitive edge.
With Microsoft, it again used government help in the form of government contracts for computers, plus patents and copyrights with OEM bundling meant that it was a monopoly.
Google really uses none of this. Google isn't like MS and uses a few OEMs (which use patents, copyright and government funds to operate) to require bundling.
Why does Google have marketshare? It has marketshare simply because it is the best. When you get marketshare not from locking-in consumers, not by taking government money, not by getting special legal protection, Google should be able to do whatever they want because customers can switch pretty easily.
It doesn't hurt consumers if Google messes with their search results because of these things. If enough people don't want them to, guess what? People will switch, just like people switched from Alta-Vista, to Yahoo! to Google. The idea that having significant marketshare in competition makes you prone to more things is complete bullshit. Now, granted there are things that companies should be held accountable because of a few things:
A) Have legal protection (like utilities)
B) Have used large amounts of tax dollars
C) Were specifically designed to deny consumers choice
Other than those 3 cases, companies should be able to do whatever they want. And Google falls into none of the 3.
The problem is that there is no monopoly here, no lock-in. Lets see here:
A) No "default" lock-in, fire up a new OEM computer and chances are, Google isn't the default home page or search engine. Usually its one of MS's offerings.
B) No e-mail lock-in, Gmail supports forwarding and also standardized access via POP
C) No phone lock-in, Android is by far the most open of the popular Smartphone OSes beating both Windows Mobile and iOS.
The only thing Google should possibly get an Anti-trust suit is with Google Book Search but that is mostly because of how fucked-up the copyright situation is in the US and not because Google is trying to be evil.
Being good at something so people use your site is not a monopoly, it is competition.
New technologies are -always- annoying to show that they can do it. Stereo audio is one main point. Listen to recordings from when stereo was just coming out and you will hear sound shift from left to right over and over again just so they can say they did it. Look at some of the programs when color TV first came out, they used hideous color schemes to show that you could have color. Look at the the early Nintendo DS games which were all "draw something with the stylus" games before they started to get better. Etc.
Early "new" technologies show the worst at the beginning (anyone else remember the age of animated.gif images -everywhere- on the web in the 90s?). 3-D is the same way, it will be annoying at first but when the technology improves and directors make things work, things get a lot better.
It already looks different than the genuine protection page (where it says to download and "upgrade") and so for the technically savvy people that should be an obvious red flag, for everyone else, they wouldn't know the difference with or without a security image.
Imitating warning pages or other elements of the UI is not a new tactic. Back in the 90s and 2000s there were lots of "You are the 223423424th person to view this page" banners that were deliberately trying to imitate Windows 9X or XP.
Um, no I really don't want to use QuickTime at all. I'd rather a few things happened:
A) Microsoft implemented basic codec support out-of-the-box using native libraries included with Windows
B) Apple (and most other programs) used these codecs
C) The weird codecs could be implemented by third party programs (like VLC)
Basic codec support should be a library in -any- commercial OS (yeah, there are reasons for not including all codecs with Ubuntu/Fedora and other OSS OSes) and programs should use it.
You have to use a third party program like SharePod (http://www.getsharepod.com/) to get it to work. I had the same issue, now I just keep SharePod on a flash drive and can dump my music collection wherever. And for your second problem try ( http://www.obsessable.com/how-to/how-to-deauthorize-all-your-itunes-accounts-at-once/ ) but I haven't ever used it so your results might vary.
Then either A) You have a Mac or B) You have an awesome machine. I've ran iTunes on Windows 7 with a Core i7 and 6 GB of RAM and it still lagged. iTunes on OS X is rather nice, iTunes on Windows is complete crap. Plus, it takes about 10 times as long to "process" a song as it does to download it!
Explain then why the war in Iraq is apparently "needed" to secure free speech? Was Saddam Hussein wiretapping US citizens? No wait... that was our own government... Oh wait! I know the Taliban was screwing up our economy! No wait... that was congress...
How did we not start the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Lets see here, Bin Ladin was the leader of Al-Quada which claimed responsibility for the 9/11 attacks and where is he now? Oh wait... Hes still missing... Oh, oh I know! Those weapons of mass destruction Iraq has! Now that the government has been overturned we have found them all! Oh wait... we didn't...
The reason we invaded Iraq was a lie. After what, 8 years we still haven't even accomplished a basic goal in Afghanistan? At the cost of how many lives? How many billions of dollars?
Plus, look back in your history book a bit, we supported all these fundamentalist Islamic regimes back in the 80s!
So lets see here, either you are right and Iraq attacked us and started the war... or it was started by what "our" leaders told us... which turned out to be a total lie. So explain to me when this invasion of America happened? When Iraq landed planes, boats, etc. on American soil and fired missiles at us, etc.
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iPads are much more durable than laptops or netbooks. We've been evaluating them at my company. They are also much easier to set up.
Um, ok. So, battery dies in an iPad, what do you do? You can't just put in a new one, the batteries aren't user replaceable. Flash chip goes bad in an iPad, what do you do? You can't just take it out like you could a standard SSD and load up a standardized image on it. Screen breaks on an iPad, what do you do? Its certainly not as easy as changing a laptop's screen.
Also, you can't easily set up limited user accounts. Yeah, there are "parental controls" but that isn't going to be as safe as individual accounts.
You seem to think that there is no problem with a textbook being 10 years old. Well, a lot you (don't) know about textbooks. Not only do they need updating much more frequently then that, many schools don't have enough to give to students. They have to share them in class and cannot take them home. It's a huge problem and a huge expense.
Um, throughout high school I regularly used textbooks that were 10 years or more old for subjects that don't change Math, English, Keyboarding, etc. other than parts in the math textbook talking about a record store, it was just fine.
And so, you mean to say that somehow a school can't afford a $50 book, but can afford a $500 device + $50 book?
As for the $500 for a device. Well, that's as cheap or cheaper than all the texts a middle or high schooler uses and you didn't include all the other teaching content - interactive and all - that can be included. You can make parents share financial responsibility or assume all of it. We used to have to pay for lost or damaged textbooks. Why not iPads?
paper is not the main cost all the iPad is, is just the thing to run it. The book isn't free. You are still paying $50 a book on an iPad, the difference is that the book is electronic and not physical. If the paper was the main culprit I'd have my nook loaded up with all best sellers and would be saving a ton of money. You still have to buy the books. Yeah, there might be a slight discount, its not free though.
Like it or not, the publishers are all moving fast in this direction. Where you see that its because they can make more money I see it as they can provide more value and replace some more expensive assets.
What the fuck don't you get?
A) School pays $500 per student for an iPad
B) School pays $50 per student per book for the iPad
Is the digital model. The paper model is
A) School buys a paper book for $50 per student per book.
Yeah, e-books have some nice extras. Do they justify an extra $500 per student. Hell no.
As for the EPA, its a joke. Take for instance the BP oil spill, thanks to government intervention, BP had a liability cap! Had there been no government intervention, the people of the gulf could have sued BP for all their damages, and perhaps BP wouldn't have let such a thing happen in the first place.
As for radioactive isotopes, they simply weren't considered dangerous back then, otherwise do you think people would have drank them? The advertisers weren't exactly sneaky about what it contained....
it can also do some pretty cool stuff (like, say, Apollo, interstate freeways, gas and electric utility regulation, etc.).
Apollo was "cool" but it was a dead end. We wasted a shitload of money to just say "hey we made it to the moon" and that was it. Plus, all this info we got on how to build Apollo is classified so even though we paid for it, private companies can't get the blueprints to recreate it. So yeah, we've been to the moon... And wasted a bunch of money doing it.
Interstates are nice, but were there more efficient ways of doing it? Cheaper? Etc. My guess is, yes and had the government not done anything about it, we might have good private rail/air/subway transport or something to that degree.
Gas/Electric utility regulation is actually a terrible thing. Ever tried to contest a bill with an electric company? Its nearly impossible because thanks to a government-granted monopoly, you can't switch.
And private corporations can never breed tyranny because you have the choice to support them or not don't agree with Wal-Mart's labor policies? Don't go there, they won't get a dime of your money. Frustrated about the Sony rootkit? Don't buy Sony products. Don't like Intel's stance on IP? Don't buy Intel products. Etc. On the other hand that is impossible to do with the government for 2 reasons:
A) You can't not pay your taxes. Don't like the war in Iraq? Well, too bad, you are still paying for their bullets! Don't agree with Obama's policies? Well, too bad you have to fund them. Don't like the bailout? Too bad, you are paying for them. With companies its different, if you don't like them, they don't get your support, simple as that.
B) Our money is not real money rather it is slips of paper. The government can print all of the money it wants to fund whatever because our currency is tied to nothing so until the world wakes up and fiat currencies go back to their intrinsic value, the government can fuck with our economy all they want.
But really, your entire argument rests on the belief that anyone born poor or with learning disabilities does not deserve an education. That's a pretty low moral standard to aim for, and one you are strangely proud of.
Um, how does it? Lets imagine a scenario with no public schools at all. The world wouldn't suddenly collapse, people would just learn more efficiently. People would have a greater deal of specialization which would allow them to better perform in the workplace. Lets face it, why should Joe Sixpack who is really great at, say, diesel mechanics have to read Shakespeare when he can simply be learning how to be a better mechanic? Its silly that we've put people on a treadmill to "higher education" that basically screws the poor and the working-class. Because of government-run schools, a high school diploma is basically worthless, its not a qualification. If you walk into almost every job interview situation and proudly proclaim you graduated high school you will get laughed at. So what happens? Even for entry-level positions employers now want a college degree and that screws the poor.
Consider Joe Sixpack, he is a great diesel mechanic but bad at English, Algebra and History. So rather than Joe Sixpack being able to really study mechanics and being a better worker, he has to sit through classes that are boring for him and cost taxpayer dollars. Not only that but thanks to a high school degree being basically worthless, Joe Sixpack now has to go to tech school or a university at his own expense basically screwing him financially for the next ten years of his life unless he magically finds a job that doesn't require that, which is rare these days.
Most people should not go to college its silly that its so forced on people, we now have people only being productive from 22+ years or older and piled on with debt, or too poor to get into college and have a door slammed on them by potential employers for not going to college.
The elimination of the public school system would allow for greater specialization, better workers, better innovators who aren't wasting their time and my money.
Note that these benefits are specific to devices like the iPad and not PCs. PCs are much more expensive, delicate and difficult to set up, maintain and use.
PCs are a hell of a lot easier to batch set up and load. AFAIK you can't just remotely load up 200 iPads, on the other hand its pretty damn easy to do that with PCs, just network boot them then push all the stuff in from the network.
And the problem isn't the paper, its the publishers. Without copyright you'd pay $2-3 for a textbook, not $50-100 for one. eBook editions of things really aren't all that cheap. Plus, there is a durability/resale question. A textbook is pretty easily readable in 10 years, especially a math book, things aren't going to fundamentally change. History books, science books? Yeah. Math, English, etc? No. But they used this for math and not the other subjects. Will an iPad even hold a charge in 10 years? Won't publishers simply screw schools out of books because with digital ones you can remove the older ones and make them pay for all new books whenever you want to upgrade, etc.
As far as I can tell, yes, this is throwing money at a problem to get in the headlines. Any return on investment is minimal because the iPad doesn't eliminate the need for many things, plus, iPads are fragile. Drop a book in the hall? No big deal. Drop an iPad and you are out ~$500, lose a book and you might be out ~$50-100, lose an iPad and you are out ~$500, someone steals a book? No huge deal. Someone steals an iPad? It lands in a pawn shop somewhere. Etc.
But it doesn't. You can't just throw money at a problem and find a solution, in fact the most worthwhile solutions are the ones that cost the least. The US government has no problems tossing money in education/infrastructure but its all worthless because they are simply redistributing wealth that is more efficiently done in the private sector. Consider a private school, barring some of the weird religious schools which specialize in fascism and indoctrination, private schools are in general better because they don't get the money thrown at them every which way. Yeah, private schools are expensive, but add in how many -millions- of dollars go to public schools that don't perform. Why is it that almost every single privately educated student is better educated than a public school educated student despite massive redistribution of wealth? With a private school, they have to make every dollar count. A private school can't just ask voters for an extra million, they can't take money from people who don't use the service like public schools can. Yet they have a higher quality.
Governments breed waste, inefficiency and tyranny and can never lead to a net gain for society when compared to a private institution.
But the problem is with the publisher, not with the educational institution. Textbook publishers regularly screw students/schools for what is essentially public domain material.
In all honesty, using free primary sources and teaching the class from that would be a lot cheaper than textbooks for most classes.
Because California, like the rest of the USA is immune to the laws of economics!
Bullshit. The "community" and the "individual" have zero rights when it comes to this. Its microsoft's servers they can do whatever the hell they feel like with this. Now what they -can't- do is they can't not refund his money for putting down a legitimate town name because that is fraud.
It depends on the person, my guess is you live near a person or talk to a person on a regular basis who has more money than $75K a year. Being rich doesn't mean your elitist, you are confusing the two. I've talked to several very trusting, very level-headed people who make upwards of $100K a year, but they aren't assholes about it. They didn't go to the ivy league schools, they don't drive a 2011 car, they have a decent house, but its nothing spectacular compared to the area.
Yeah, there are rich people like Paris Hilton who everyone knows is rich, but there are a lot more people who are moderately rich who you wouldn't know that they were unless you saw their financial statement or were good friends with them.
Oh, and by the way, a lot of the people who act really "rich" really aren't, they just live on credit (you know the people, the ones who went to the Ivy League schools, drive new cars, have the huge homes, etc) and while they may be simi-rich, they live beyond their means.
Sure, right now. But lets say 20 years from now you find out you have X disease that costs Y amount to treat it with an experimental drug insurance doesnt' cover. Or lets say you find out that your parents/grandparents need taken care of, etc.
Its easy to be happy when your in your teens till about middle age on less money if you stay single, but if you have a family or when your family needs taken care of, you need a lot more money.
Not all of them, but I can guarantee you that all of them will be using some form of networking in the future, and experience there can't hurt them and will only help them, just like we aren't all going to be mechanics working in a car shop, but it sure helps to know how to do basic maintenance on a car so you don't get screwed at the service shop. Same thing with networking, if you know how to set up a network using the same principles you've used all your life playing games (setting up Xbox Live, setting up system link, getting free wi-fi from your neighbors, etc.) you aren't going to get screwed by Geek Squad.
Because if a government wants to attack a pillar of liberty, everyone should be concerned.
Governments exist to protect people from force and fraud, when they step beyond that, they turn into tyrants.
Exactly, and I guarantee you that if you walk around a college campus and ask incoming Freshman their first experience with networking it will almost always be related to getting past a block of some site in high/middle school. Ordinarily, few high school students would use proxies, VPNs, etc. but when they can use it to play games or get on Facebook...
The problem is that makes no sense. Pre-digital laws when applied in the digital world make no fucking sense and to apply them is stupidity.
Monopolies are bad in the physical world because they take limited resources and monopolize them. There are only so many oil wells in the world, there are only so much (clean) water in the world, etc. when a single company takes control of them they can charge through the roof and make everyone else pay. But this isn't like that.
Barring government intervention in the form of software patents, there are no limited resources when it comes to ads on the web, and barring lock-in with physical things or a -huge- company taking all available IP addresses/bandwidth or something, a monopoly can't exist that harms consumers.
The idea that any company can monopolize infinite resources is laughable. Don't like Google? Use one of their thousands of competitors. Don't like DoubleClick, advertise elsewhere.
The internet allows for unlimited resources, you can't monopolize infinity. Just because the law says something doesn't mean its right, correct and not fucking stupid.
The problem is, with virtual things there is no monopoly when there is no lock-in look at Standard Oil, they could nearly monopolize the oil industry because there aren't an infinite number of oil wells. On the other hand whats the overhead for opening up a competitor to Google Ads/Double Click, its effectively zero. A monopoly is bad because it monopolizes a limited resource, with an internet company there is no scarcity! Barring government intervention in the form of software patents, there is no barrier to me starting up my own internet ad company.
Pre-digital laws make no sense when transitioning to digital. Monopolies are bad because they monopolize a limited resource, since there are really no* limited resources on the internet, it makes no sense to punish a company for being a non-existent monopoly which can't exist because there are no limited resources to monopolize.
*With the exception of things like IP addresses, bandwidth, etc which will all grow as the internet grows, but in essence the point still stands unless the reason Google is being sued is because of using up too many addresses.
Yes it does, Standard Oil was a monopoly because it was not better than its competition but rather relied on the government to fuel its practices, without the government. Plus, by the time Standard Oil was about to be broken up, competitors had effectively nullified its competitive edge.
With Microsoft, it again used government help in the form of government contracts for computers, plus patents and copyrights with OEM bundling meant that it was a monopoly.
Google really uses none of this. Google isn't like MS and uses a few OEMs (which use patents, copyright and government funds to operate) to require bundling.
But that doesn't make sense.
Why does Google have marketshare? It has marketshare simply because it is the best. When you get marketshare not from locking-in consumers, not by taking government money, not by getting special legal protection, Google should be able to do whatever they want because customers can switch pretty easily.
It doesn't hurt consumers if Google messes with their search results because of these things. If enough people don't want them to, guess what? People will switch, just like people switched from Alta-Vista, to Yahoo! to Google. The idea that having significant marketshare in competition makes you prone to more things is complete bullshit. Now, granted there are things that companies should be held accountable because of a few things:
A) Have legal protection (like utilities)
B) Have used large amounts of tax dollars
C) Were specifically designed to deny consumers choice
Other than those 3 cases, companies should be able to do whatever they want. And Google falls into none of the 3.
The problem is that there is no monopoly here, no lock-in. Lets see here:
A) No "default" lock-in, fire up a new OEM computer and chances are, Google isn't the default home page or search engine. Usually its one of MS's offerings.
B) No e-mail lock-in, Gmail supports forwarding and also standardized access via POP
C) No phone lock-in, Android is by far the most open of the popular Smartphone OSes beating both Windows Mobile and iOS.
The only thing Google should possibly get an Anti-trust suit is with Google Book Search but that is mostly because of how fucked-up the copyright situation is in the US and not because Google is trying to be evil.
Being good at something so people use your site is not a monopoly, it is competition.
New technologies are -always- annoying to show that they can do it. Stereo audio is one main point. Listen to recordings from when stereo was just coming out and you will hear sound shift from left to right over and over again just so they can say they did it. Look at some of the programs when color TV first came out, they used hideous color schemes to show that you could have color. Look at the the early Nintendo DS games which were all "draw something with the stylus" games before they started to get better. Etc.
.gif images -everywhere- on the web in the 90s?). 3-D is the same way, it will be annoying at first but when the technology improves and directors make things work, things get a lot better.
Early "new" technologies show the worst at the beginning (anyone else remember the age of animated
It already looks different than the genuine protection page (where it says to download and "upgrade") and so for the technically savvy people that should be an obvious red flag, for everyone else, they wouldn't know the difference with or without a security image.
Imitating warning pages or other elements of the UI is not a new tactic. Back in the 90s and 2000s there were lots of "You are the 223423424th person to view this page" banners that were deliberately trying to imitate Windows 9X or XP.
Um, no I really don't want to use QuickTime at all. I'd rather a few things happened:
A) Microsoft implemented basic codec support out-of-the-box using native libraries included with Windows
B) Apple (and most other programs) used these codecs
C) The weird codecs could be implemented by third party programs (like VLC)
Basic codec support should be a library in -any- commercial OS (yeah, there are reasons for not including all codecs with Ubuntu/Fedora and other OSS OSes) and programs should use it.
You have to use a third party program like SharePod (http://www.getsharepod.com/) to get it to work. I had the same issue, now I just keep SharePod on a flash drive and can dump my music collection wherever. And for your second problem try ( http://www.obsessable.com/how-to/how-to-deauthorize-all-your-itunes-accounts-at-once/ ) but I haven't ever used it so your results might vary.
Then either A) You have a Mac or B) You have an awesome machine. I've ran iTunes on Windows 7 with a Core i7 and 6 GB of RAM and it still lagged. iTunes on OS X is rather nice, iTunes on Windows is complete crap. Plus, it takes about 10 times as long to "process" a song as it does to download it!
Explain then why the war in Iraq is apparently "needed" to secure free speech? Was Saddam Hussein wiretapping US citizens? No wait... that was our own government... Oh wait! I know the Taliban was screwing up our economy! No wait... that was congress...
How did we not start the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Lets see here, Bin Ladin was the leader of Al-Quada which claimed responsibility for the 9/11 attacks and where is he now? Oh wait... Hes still missing... Oh, oh I know! Those weapons of mass destruction Iraq has! Now that the government has been overturned we have found them all! Oh wait... we didn't...
The reason we invaded Iraq was a lie. After what, 8 years we still haven't even accomplished a basic goal in Afghanistan? At the cost of how many lives? How many billions of dollars?
Plus, look back in your history book a bit, we supported all these fundamentalist Islamic regimes back in the 80s!
So lets see here, either you are right and Iraq attacked us and started the war... or it was started by what "our" leaders told us... which turned out to be a total lie. So explain to me when this invasion of America happened? When Iraq landed planes, boats, etc. on American soil and fired missiles at us, etc.